PETA has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and called on Wake Forest University (WFU) to investigate after documenting that the school applied funding from NIH to experiments on monkeys at Chongqing Medical University in China, in violation of federal rules.
A paper coauthored by WFU experimenter Carol Shively reveals that NIH grant money helped finance a study in which experimenters blasted monkeys with a loud buzzing sound for 12 hours, administered electric shocks to their feet, flashed strobe lights at them for 12-hour stretches, drenched them with cold water for 10 minutes at a time, and deprived them of food and water for extended periods.
Federal policies governing the use of NIH funds explicitly state that institutions may only use the money to experiment on animals if they have written assurance acceptable to the U.S. Public Health Service—a qualification Chongqing Medical University does not have.
“Experimenters at WFU used taxpayer money to fund CIA black-site torture methods on sensitive, fearful monkeys in a country that has weaker animal protections,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “Such a clear-cut case of ethics dumping is why PETA demands an investigation from both NIH and university officials and a ban on future public funds for Shively.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Because a winter weather advisory is in effect for the Jackson area due to the Arctic blast, PETA is sharing tips for keeping animals safe. They are especially vulnerable in cold weather and winter storms, and there were at least 37 cold weather–related companion animal deaths in 2019. (Those are just the ones that were reported—most aren’t.) A glimpse of just some of the dogs PETA’s fieldworkers have found suffering in the cold this winter can be seen here.
The following steps can go a long way in helping animals survive this Arctic blast and other cold weather:
Bring Them Indoors
Companion animals should always live indoors. “Backyard dogs” and “outdoor cats”—like those featured in Breaking the Chain, the new documentary produced by Oscar winner Anjelica Huston—often go without adequate food, water, shelter, and veterinary care. They are no better equipped to survive freezing temperatures or extreme weather conditions than humans are, they suffer terribly from frostbite, and they can die of exposure.
Gear Up
Coats will keep dogs comfortable in cold weather, secure harnesses can help prevent them from getting loose on walks, and booties will protect their sensitive paw pads from the frozen ground. Keep walks short in cold weather, especially for shorthaired dogs.
Don’t Forget Birds
During extreme winter weather, provide birds and other wild animals with access to an emergency water supply by filling a heavy nonmetal water bowl (tongues can freeze to metal) and breaking the surface ice at least twice a day.
Good Samaritans who see companion animals kept chained or penned outside 24/7 or without adequate shelter from the elements should note the animals’ exact location and alert local law-enforcement authorities immediately.Anyone who leaves animals outside to suffer in severe weather may be prosecuted.
On Valentine’s Day, a “cow,” an “alpaca,” a “sheep,” and a “goat” will lead PETA supporters as they descend on an Anthropologie store in Gainesville and “close it for cruelty.” The action is part of the group’s international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters—stop selling leather, alpaca fleece, wool, cashmere, and other materials stolen from animals. The protesters will hold signs showing the faces of animals and reading, “A Wool Coat Stops a Bleating Heart.”
“Animals used by the fashion industry are the same as humans in all the ways that count: They experience heartbreak, feel pain, and want to spend time with loved ones,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Anthropologie can win over PETA’s heart—and the heart of anyone who cares about animals—this Valentine’s Day by pulling wool, leather, and other cruelly obtained materials from its shelves.”
PETA launched its campaign after Anthropologie was implicated in a first-of-its-kind PETA investigation revealing that workers mutilated alpacas during shearing. Other videos have revealed that workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; leave sensitive goats with bloody, gaping wounds at mohair and cashmere operations; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; yank out the feathers of ducks and geese by the fistful for down; and boil silkworms alive to produce silk.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
An experimenter at Wake Forest University (WFU) appears to be funneling your tax dollars to China in order to conduct obscenely unethical experiments on monkeys that amount to outright animal torture, CIA black site–style—and the school appears to be in violation of U.S. Public Health Service requirements.
What We Know
A paper, co-authored by Carol A. Shively of the Department of Pathology at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and published in January, describes experiments conducted at Chongqing Medical University in China that are so extreme that they likely would never be allowed to take place in the U.S. The paper reports that the experiments, designed to induce depression in adolescent macaques, were in part bankrolled by a taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, even though the Chinese school isn’t authorized to receive NIH money.
Torture, Plain and Simple
Lab workers caged the macaques alone for 80 days. For 55 continuous days, experimenters blasted them with a 100-decibel sound—roughly the volume of a jackhammer—for 12 consecutive hours. They deprived the animals of water or any other fluids for 12 hours at a time and of food for 24 hours. They put the monkeys in cages barely bigger than their bodies, severely restricting their movement for four hours; sprayed them with cold (50-degree) water for 10 minutes; forced them to endure a strobe light for 12 hours; and subjected them to inescapable and repeated electric shocks on their feet for up to 90 seconds.
Food and water deprivation, movement restriction, sonic and cold-water blasts, and electric shocks—by any standard, this is torture. This behavior toward humans is banned by international law and punishable by strict penalties. The authors also subjected the monkeys to the human-intruder test, a wildly cruel experiment developed by notorious monkey tormenter Ned Kalin, to “elicit anxiety-like behaviors.”
At the end of the torture, the monkeys exhibited signs of depression, such as assuming a “huddle posture” by clasping themselves with their heads at or below the shoulders while awake. They spent less time moving and were disinterested in items, such as apples, that they had previously enjoyed.
Ethics Dumping as a ‘Promising Model’
These egregious experiments appear to be a case of “ethics dumping,” or outsourcing experiments to a country with lax ethical and legal protections. Possibly the most disturbing aspect of this case is that these grotesque experiments have been proposed as a “paradigm” to create “a promising model” to study depression. Shively and others are actually encouraging others to repeat the torture outlined in the paper as a starting point from which to carry out additional experiments on these suffering animals.
Garbage Science
Sexual and physical abuse, substance-use disorders, interpersonal relationship problems, economic stress, and chronic illness or injury are more common life traumas associated with mental illness in humans. Blasting monkeys with water cannons, bombarding them with jackhammer-like sounds, and blinding them with strobe lights are not the same thing by a long shot. Add that to the fundamental differences in gene expression, brain anatomy, physiology, and development among humans and other primates, and you have experiments that are doomed to fail from the start.
WFU has a panel charged with overseeing animal experiments called the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC). However, its stamp of approval is curiously missing from the published paper. This is problematic.
If the IACUC did actually review and approve these experiments, it suggests that the committee is incapable of doing its job and implicates it in an obvious case of ethics dumping. If the panel knew that Shively used some of her NIH grant money to bankroll the experiments but didn’t review or approve them, it also suggests that it can’t uphold its legally mandated responsibilities. Either way, WFU’s IACUC has some explaining to do.
Stop Monkey Torment, Here and Abroad
PETA has filed a complaint with NIH and demanded that Wake Forest launch an immediate and thorough investigation into the possible misappropriation of NIH money and the possible failure of the school’s IACUC.
You don’t have to go all the way to China to find NIH-funded monkey horrors. Elisabeth Murray’s monkey fright fest—egregiously awful experiments in which experimenters inflict permanent and debilitating brain damage on monkeys, deprive them of food and water, restrain them for extended periods, and lock them inside darkened cages, where they’re deliberately frightened with fake spiders and snakes—take place right here in an NIH laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland.
Because a winter storm warning is forecast for the Bend area, PETA is sharing tips for keeping animals safe. They are especially vulnerable in cold weather and winter storms, and there were at least 37 cold weather–related companion animal deaths in 2019. (Those are just the ones that were reported—most aren’t.) A glimpse of just some of the dogs PETA’s fieldworkers have found suffering in the cold this winter can be seen here.
The following steps can go a long way in helping animals survive this winter storm and other cold weather:
Bring Them Indoors
Companion animals should always live indoors. “Backyard dogs” and “outdoor cats”—like those featured in Breaking the Chain, the new documentary produced by Oscar winner Anjelica Huston—often go without adequate food, water, shelter, and veterinary care. They are no better equipped to survive freezing temperatures or extreme weather conditions than humans are, they suffer terribly from frostbite, and they can die of exposure.
Gear Up
Coats will keep dogs comfortable in cold weather, secure harnesses can help prevent them from getting loose on walks, and booties will protect their sensitive paw pads from the frozen ground. Keep walks short in cold weather, especially for shorthaired dogs.
Don’t Forget Birds
During extreme winter weather, provide birds and other wild animals with access to an emergency water supply by filling a heavy nonmetal water bowl (tongues can freeze to metal) and breaking the surface ice at least twice a day.
Good Samaritans who see companion animals kept chained or penned outside 24/7 or without adequate shelter from the elements should note the animals’ exact location and alert local law-enforcement authorities immediately.Anyone who leaves animals outside to suffer in severe weather may be prosecuted.
